Do you have a plan that you stick with, no matter what? Do you have a plan at all? Do you have a plan that you're prepared to give up totally when a student proposes something, anything, interesting? Are you patient, listening to what's going on, allowing yourself to be pulled, and slick enough (skilled enough?) to react and create something magical out of your box to make a lesson sing?
When we're working with our Design Thinking Schools the main challenge that comes up, at the beginning at least, is the desire of educators to forward plan to the extent that improvisations - or mistakes - can't be seized upon to create something much better than the plan the teacher had written, and probably stayed up until 11pm on Sunday night writing.
Stefon Harris explains in his TED Talk how this over reliance on the plan is, in jazz, a form of musical bullying. As someone who, in his early twenties, almost gave it all up to be a big band drummer, I know exactly what he means, and I know how it feels when 17 other musicians move their plan to accommodate for another's idea.
But I can also picture it in the classroom, where a "gift" is offered up by a students' question (or a student's lack of understanding) but isn't built upon by the teacher. Who or what are you going to allow to improvise and shift your plan today?
Walking back from dinner in Brisbane last week, Tom and I spotted something brilliant: mistakes. Lots of them.
A group of a half dozen streetdancers were practicing the hard stuff, and it's the part of streetdance that we never see. To get really good at something, you have to practice the hard stuff, not just rejoice in the cool, do-able, 'easy' parts. You have to prepared for a fall, and for your friends laughing at your expense!
Tom had the (Dutch?) courage to go and start asking some questions while I set up the tripod, and Paul, leader of the crew, came over for a chat that he allowed us to record. In it he reveals just how much hip hop practice is a genuinely superb example of formative assessment in action. I don't think he had read Dylan Wiliam's Inside the Black Box, but he might as well have done. Here, you can see talented dancers somewhat hiding away in the dark of a vestibule, practicing the bits they don't want anyone to see. It's a great example of where not having an audience is incredibly important, or at least, only having an audience that one can trust.
We have the same foundations, it's like the same language to describe what we're doing, and we build on it.
If I like what I see then I wouldn't do the same thing - they'd say that I had "no soul". Instead, I'll do something different that's still built on the same foundations.
If I see someone not spending enough time on the tricky stuff, then I'll tell them. They might try it slower, faster, higher...
Sometimes people "take the Mickey", and tell each other that something's bad, but generally we always try to help each other, keep it all positive.
Meanwhile, Céline Azoulay-Lewin Facebooked me the video clip of a teacher, Sam Seidel, who, with a group of demanding students in a juvenile prison, found that Hip Hop was the key passion they shared, the key mechanism not only of engagement, but in turning these young people who had been told they were at society's bottom rung into responsible leaders with something worth sharing. He asks: what can educators learn from hip hop?
He points out:
Aspiring visual artists realising that they didn't need a gallery to promote their work
The high school drop out putting his entrepreneurial hustle into action to stop selling drugs, to sell CDs out the back of his car to selling products in Macy's;
You don't need a huge number of resources to make a big hit - the hip hop community has a habit of turning something out of nothing, sampling others' music to make new sounds, for example;
We can sample and mix multiple teaching techniques, rather than thinking there's a right way to do something;
We can try and make a "hot beat for today" - yesterday's way of teaching is yesterday's way of teaching - what can we do to recycle, remix and try something fresh in the hope that it's better than what went before?
What refuse could we be dancing on? What is the cutback or the 'trash' of yesterday that can feed innovation today?
In a break for our normal service (and any chance of getting real work done this Sunday morning) I bring you Piano Improv on Chatroulette. There's a wee bit of naughty language but, contrary to most of my own Chatroulette experiences, no rude body parts. You will laugh, maybe even be amazed by a guy with some talent and free time on his hands. I'm not going to suggest that music classrooms around the world start using Chatroulette for edyoocashun, but we can giggle a little at the curricular move that might have been...
Update: After a particularly productive morning I've discovered that the talented guy with piano and some time either is Ben from Ben Folds Five, or a good lookalike. The real Ben Folds has since responded to the User Generated inspiration and thus reinvented U2's penchant for the ritual phone call to Presidents and Prime Minsters: he now Chatroulettes with random members of the public during his 2000-seater concerts, creating witty and nsfw songs for them. Brilliant. And that means I've discovered the party piece we'll force Derek Robertson to do at Games-Based Learning in a fortnight.
A lovely, simple idea that combines music and language arts, while introducing new generations to the institution of British radio that started in 1942: Desert Island Discs.
Spotify, if you've not banned it in your schools, provides a legal means to look up almost any song you want and play it, immediately. In an age where young people can't do much without having older generations complain about it - not least listen to the music they want to - this would be an interesting way to get under their musical skin, and find out what eight discs (or rather, MP3s) they would take to a desert island with them. Get them to write down their motivations, but then, in a good old fashioned display of classroom presentation, students can interview each other without a script about their choices and listen to the music critically as a group.
Classroom activity or dinner party distraction? The choice is yours. As ever, let me know how it turns out.
Oxford University has banned Spotify, the legal music-sharing service currently available across Europe. The reason? It uses up too much bandwidth. I've been in a few clients' establishments where this is also true, whether the bandwidth-hungry service be well-known and seen as 'legitimate' (e.g. BBC iPlayer) or little known and misunderstood (e.g. Spotify).
When we're building national internet infrastructures, as we have done in the UK and which are emerging at great speed in New Zealand, India and China, we can underestimate by some distance what is going to be required by generations not too much in the future. In 2005, 100mbps for a 1000-student secondary school seemed lightning fast, given that we had been struggling on 10mbps until then. However, in an age where most new content is available, first and foremost, in high quality HD, this "high" speed feels like a snail's pace, especially when any more than 20 of those 1000 students is using such a service.
What's the answer? Invest more than we can afford now on the understanding that it will pay off by the time it's installed? See internet infrastructure as a genuine investment, like motorways and skyscrapers, rather than just a spend that has to be made?
Yann Thiersen composed the music to one of my favourite French films, Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain. In the video clip above he plays the Comptine D'Un Autre Eté: L'après-midi on six iPhones. Bluetooth-iPhone-App-tastic.
For kids making their own podcasts (or French teachers for that matter) try using these great sites to get hold of music to liven things up. All the music is Creative Commons Licence", which means you can use it without having to pay royalties.
From France, Belgium and Germany specifically, go to Jamendo (thanks Julien).
Any other Francophone or other foreign podsafe music providers out there?
Via Boing Boing comes this great little treat. If you're like me (go on, admit it, you might well be) then listening to old radio commercials gives you a tingle of excitement, a feeling of discovering (or in some case rediscovering) those grainy Kodachrome days. My favourite is the 7UP commercial, from the time when musicians wrote real songs to sell products. Go on, listen and enjoy.
I have just added The Singing Fish to my del.icio.us page. This is a fantastic internet search tool that looks only for audio and video related to your subject.
And in the classroom...
Type in 'Bonjour' and you have a fantastically cheesy rendition of 'Bonjour, Bonjour' to cheer your new S1s as they enter the classroom for the first time this August. You get a choice of a 30-second excerpt or the full song, just the music or even the video that goes along with it: great for data-projection.
Ewan McIntosh is a teacher, speaker and investor, regarded as one of Europe’s foremost experts in digital media for public services.
His company, NoTosh Limited, invests in tech startups and film on behalf of public and private investors, works with those companies to build their creative businesses, and takes the lessons learnt from the way these people work back into schools and universities across the world.
Do you worry that your school or district could better harness its people, digital technology or physical space? Do you want some actionable inspiration, a mentor for a learning journey with your staff?
In a keynote or masterclass we can give them concrete ideas based on experience, enthusiasm fired by a vision of what can be, and backup before and after to make it happen for them.
